“If you’re gonna write, you’re gonna need adventure,” says Mister Smartass for like the seventh time. I tell him to keep his fuckin’ eyes on the road. Besides, he picked me up hitchhiking, ain’t that adventure enough?
“Nope. You gotta live, man. Taste the rainbow. You get a story worth tellin’, you look my friend Lewis up. Works in publishing out in L.A.”
He pushes a Doors tape in and I study the cassette case. I figure I got twelve minutes ‘til “Light My Fire” comes on. Song drives me fuckin’ bananas. “Drop me off in the next town.”
He does with seconds to spare; I can hear that godawful organ intro as he peels away. It’s sunset now and I duck into some shitkicker bar for a beer and a sandwich, and as it arrives a comedy show starts, of all things. This guy Freddy Something gets introduced and he seriously takes the stage in a Groucho Marx getup and I can tell there’s gonna be trouble. Sure enough his lousy act gets him booed, then threatened; one drunken fool launches a bottle at him and nobody does shit about it, though it draws laughs as it explodes behind him. I form a sort of vaudeville hook with my hand, pull Freddy off the stage before someone kills him.
“Thanks, friend,” he says. “What’s your story?”
“Thumbin’ rides. Headed to Los Angeles,” I say, though truthfully I hadn’t considered where I was going.
“I got a Studebaker.”
“Yeah?” I look at him funny, but he’s serious. “You probably could use a career change anyhow.”
“You got that right.”
So we drive. Things are quiet on the interstate, but the first time we stop for gas we get into a wreck with a truck driven by a wiry fellow with a huge mop of curly hair, so black it’s almost blue, wearing these crazy mismatched patterns. Calls himself The Weirdo. We like him.
Both cars are fucked so we trade ‘em in for a station wagon. There’s three of us so we drive in shifts, one person asleep in the back, and we ride until The Weirdo gets hungry and makes us stop at this county fair. I meet Missy, a proper country girl; I buy her ice cream and she ends up heading West with us. She’s curvy – Freddy calls her porky under his breath, so I punch him. Just hard enough.
We’re gassing up again in Eastern California when I get jumped outside the station bathroom. “Been chasin’ you for days,” this dude wheezes, all beady-eyed and drunkenly. He’s got a knife, and I don’t see Missy or The Weirdo or Freddy anywhere. Just as my attacker lunges, a dog emerges from nowhere and bites his leg, snarls, chases him off. He acts all sweet with me and seems stray so we put him in the wagon.
In the end it turns out there is a Lewis in publishing; I tell him this story and he digs it. There’s a rainbow hanging over the bookstore parking lot during my book signing, and as I consider tasting it I get to hoping Mister Smartass will come tearing through the embarrassingly large “Meet The Author!” banner. I think he’d like my new friends.